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Brief notes: BJs, Beanworld, Bodgers

Three quick things.
a) I finally got to read ‘The Platonic Blow’ by Auden. I’d heard about it for years, but never seen it. It lives up to the word of mouth (lols not intended) – dirty, not great. Solid, but then you wouldn’t expect anything less than technical and syntactic control from Auden.

ii. I only just heard that Larry Marder is back at work on Beanworld. This is incredibly cheering news; it’s one of my favourite comics ever. On a gushy & blathery blog I had in the day I said this about it:

Final word: there are acts of creation that you can understand. They exist within generic models; talent and craft are both evident; inspiration and skill both visible; though they can be challenging, you can see where they’ve come from, and what they’re doing. Then there’s stuff like this – much of the same applies (there’s no lack of craft here), but there’s something almost impossible to grasp about how these works came into the world. They’re strange, really not like anything else. They’re not necessarily better, but they are rarer – pay attention when you sniff these out.

That’s about right. Though ‘not necessarily better’ is wet, and I would rescind it.

Three: Mark E Smith, Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, Jocelyn Brooke… this guy’s okay by me. Actually, I’m slightly jealous that he’s lighted on the Brotherhood of Ruralists as a subject. The shitness of Second Series Arden Shakespeare covers is a topic that requires urgent scholarly attention, yet academics remain all Q-this and F-that. What gives?